Posts by tim chubb

Solar-powered ion drive asteroid probe set for launch

RE : patent contention?

in the voice of comic book guy from the simpsons :

"Best Comment Ever"

nice one

dude

Nokia picks up good vibrations license deal

Not Just N95

think you will find a lot of Nokia handsets buzz when you turn them on or off, my 6233 certainly does...

Also isn't Immersion the company that sued Sony over its vibrating joypads?

Whats there patent for, all applications of a motor with an offset weight attached to the business end?

if so whats the betting the next reg headline featuring them will be :

"Immersion and Ann Summers get in bed together"

...I'll get my coat

Catherine Tate to accompany Doctor Who

for the love of god why????

catharine tate is shite, and about as funny as your "crazy" uncle at a wedding with the acting ability of Calculon. why?????

As for the finale of season 3, any one else think the flying ship thing looked more than a bit like the spectrum air base from captain scarlet?

Never mind the total rip off of the phantasm movies, brains inside flying spheres with knifes and lazers, that kill people, controlled by a 'master' (ok a tall guy with yellow blood but never mind)

And why was the master killed with only one bullet, thought being a time lord he had built in redundancy with 2 hearts??

And do you just get the feeling they reused the animation from series 2, just replaced daleks and cybermen with spheres?

this has just confirmed that the cancellation of this current run cant come soon enough, bastards, seriously pissed off at how much they can and have cocked up dr who

Cell hack geek stalks pretty blonde shocker

phones never are off unless there is no battery

other wise you would have to set your clock every time you turn it off, just goes into negligable power usage mode. Its not like you are changing the batteries in bed side digital clocks very reguarly is it?

as for turning the thing on remotely, can think of a few possible ways to do it. the easiest method i can imagine is :

1) acquire targets phone number

2) push out a "service message" appearing to be from telco provider, construct the update so that the user's screen is switched off when they 'power off' the phone, then set the phone to reboot next time the power button is pressed, thus appearing to be behaving normally. the battery would only really go down whilst the mic was active and transmitting.

admittedly that isnt turning the phone on remotely, but thats the sort of phraseology that can mean any thing and likely be a dumbed down explanation to save having to explain to plebs about trickle currents and off and "off". i mean imagine try explaining to the average techno phobe that an ATX pc is never switched off unless the psu switch (on the back of it) is off or its unplugged, theres always some current being drawn, but for all intents and purposes the pc is perceived as off by all but the '10 sorts of people...' crowd (i know, i am one, pot calling kettle black etc. etc. etc., but still least im not gibbering about my collection of micro computers, or valve based RF service gear)

Sucky software? So add a virgin

metooism

i think one of the reasons a lot of software sucks is that, the developers feel compelled to include features a rival may have innovated with and they just bolt similar functionality on.

normally to the detriment of getting any thing done. for example roxio's 'wizard' interface which nero pretty much copied with nero express. i just cant see how it simplifies the creation of a cd. if a split view of cd file structure and hard drive structure which you drag and drop between is too much for your brain to comprehend, you probably need to forget about using the cd your creating as the eject button will probably be too much for you to handle when you come to use it

annother easy way to make software suck is not allowing me to maximise it (reason, you over rated sequencer), especially given the price of huge monitors these days (was only ten years ago when having a 15" monitor was a considerable upgrade in price, and anything over 17" was serious high end kit) i want to take advantage of all the space i now have, using reason as an example, why cant i make it full screen and have the racks side by side, instead of one stupidly long down scroll, constrained to a width to fit on a 1024 * 768 resolution, it looks retarded at 1600....

then again prehaps shitty software is a reflection on society. shitty seems to be new standard to aim for, shitty tv, shitty music, shitty films, obbsession with people who's only noteworthy act was winning a draw and getting to be on tv. or can play a sport well, both pretty useless deeds, i mean what good has it ever done, other than a few photo shoots with disadvantaged kids. its not like edmond hillary who climbed a sodding mountain, struggled and generally went through a world of shit to reach the top, who actually did something to earn my respect, unlike all these gobshites, who seem to think that being on tv is reason enough for my respect, or that there 'struggles' with what ever self imposed situation they find em selves in are worth any thing more than filling the space between adverts, might as well do the job properly and be a cultural tourist/paracite/whore for a year, sorry i mean take a gap year and go travelling the well trodden path of oz, thailand and back to oz. At least then they would only be inflicted upon there nearest and dearest, not every other fucker who unfortunatly happened to be channel hopping

in a nut shell, sucky software, comes from a shitty social trend to glorify and revell in ignorance (jade, paris, and any other dumbass, especially that prick off big brother, who asked what a shakespear was, and claimed to never have heard of romeo and juliet ("aint he that guy from so solid crew...")), and an apathetic society which watches it because its sold as entertainment and they consume it, useless bloody cows munching on the grass of reality tv and gameshows, can only hope the van from the abattoir is arriving shortly. if as a society we will accept that sort of shit, then its no wonder that we accept equally naff code

Google calls for court to tighten Microsoft's anti-trust leash

its a fricken OS feature

what next, someone demanding that the file system in vista be made interchangable so that you can use something else?

the fact is that google want to be able to track and advertise to you at every opertunity, the only reason they could possibly need further integration, is to really snoop on you as far as im concerned.

i mean as long as they can traverse the file structure thats enough access for a sodding file search.

i mean what next, will they want a gdir command incase some one fires up command prompt and types "dir <lostfile name>*.* /s"

thing is, u know M$ will be getting thousands of support calls from plebs, not understanding that the google search is nothing to do with ms, but cus its so well integrated it will appear to be part of m$'s remit for support, i dont see what good it can do other than cause a great deal of confusion. i mean if numpty bush talks about 'the google' god help the rest of the uneducated american masses (no offence at the 5% of the american population or so that manage free thought)

besides who needs a desktop search to index all your stuff, is it really to much hassle to just create a logical folder structure?

e.g. my docs/word/[project, topic, subject name]/<file name>

obviously it is, and why on earth youwould want the install files, samples and help files included in the index i dont know

basically to my mind this is a non problem, as better integration of a shit product, just makes a well integrated shit product.

Rufus fights back

no sympathy

have about as much sympathy for tech support who get 'abused' by the customers, as bar staff who complain and act shocked that people smoke in a pub and its bad for there health.

news flash, u dont have to take the job, office cleaning pays as well as bar work and tech support and given the quality of most tech suports ive dealt with (scripted drones, who unlike automated systems cant be speeded up by knowing the right sequence to navigate a menu) office cleaning is a far more suited profession for them

as for people with accents, it seems like 1 in 10 people you speak to in a call center has an understandable grasp of the spoken language. some seem to have a good grasp but very limited vocabulary, making it very difficult to communicate effectivly. the rest well, sub dog intelligence.

[i am pissed off with tech support, after 19 phone calls, 3 hang ups, 17 promises of emails, and the same bloody script over and over, just to try and get (still isnt working) http uploads working on a web server, (one of the drones, decided my problem must lie with ftp access, despite me telling him repeatedly, that it was nothing to do with FTP, and that the FTP worked fine]

grrr, sure there must be a few hell desk peons worth there wage, but im yet to come across any

Blogosphere is the net spawn of Satan: official

crap 2.0 terms for very dull things

1. Folksonomy - user defined categories

2. Blogosphere - http comms

3. Blog - guest book, without any guests entries

4. Netiquette - manners for the socially retarded

5. Blook - unpublishable shite

could carry on, but wont

Woman cleans keyboard... in dishwasher

too much hassle

y bother with the entire keyb?

pop the keys, put in the knife basket, jobs a good un

just wipe the chasis down....

annother key cleaning trick i often use, is the good old vinegar and water (best with hot water) solution put into a jug, which i put all the keys in, and stir with a fork or whisk (hand not electric) for 5 mins, then give each key a wipe and reinstall

if stirring is too much hassle, use an empty pop bottle, put the lid on and shake about

find i can recondition a keyboard in about 30 mins like that, only use a dish washwasher when i have more than 5 keyboards to process

as for dome style membranes, i find that hooking the top edge then just pushing down the key till it clicks gets them back on fine, dont try to press them straight down like you would a sheet membrane

if any one has an easy way to reattach a space bar let me know.........

Need hard facts? Try Conservapedia

how does that work??....

'an objective, bias-free piece from a conservative perspective'

surely that's an oxymoron????

still if they do believe all that creationist BS, doubt they could find the entry in a dictionary to look up oxymoron, (although they could probably tell me which pages of the bible the word doesnt appear on, chapter and verse and all)

Open Rights Group recounts e-voting horror story

lol

the guys name is seriously 'Kitcat'????

Britney's new album title - can you help?

ponders 2 seconds

BALD

palacial prision (although thats more of a paris title)

rehabs 4 quiterz

the pride of a nation

Toxic : the blood report

undercarriage

Sony ponders PS3 price cut

needs bundles

only way i can see the ps3 shipping large volumes what ever the price cut will be bundling it with a hd tv

there has to be more margin for cutting display prices, and if i could pick up a 32" screen and a ps3 for less than a grand then it might seem like a better offer....

Headless zombie wanders San Francisco

maybe not a zombie

looks remarkably like an episode of pinky and the brain, when brain builds a human sized robotic suit, but still has a mouse sized head....

Apple's Safari lacks bold vision

opera beats em all

as title

konquorer/safari = okish, could try harder, annoying imcompatibilities and scripting hassle

gecko/mozilla/nutscrape = would be ok if they would fix those damn memory leaks

IE = no excuse for the bodge that it is, why cant ie6 support png's properly??, ms firefox slow, but i quite like the RSS reader in it

opera, does it all, let the peons fight to the death as opera watches over, improves and innovates its competition

Macs are more secure: official

why there are fewer viruses on macs

the script kiddies cant find the right mouse button to copy and paste with;-)

China runs out of surnames

wang....

always amused me when i was learning mandarin, that "wang" meant "king"

my revision cards looked something like this

wang-king

how have i got this far in life being that purile??????

Microsoft recruits latest open source expert

linux is only the future for those that care.....

everyone else will be quite happy with what comes out of the box

makes sense for m$ to hire people who understand how linux and similar systems work and behave.

Its not uncommon to hire a guide and or translator when in a strange country/culture. how is that any different from what m$ are currently doing?

Windows recovery loophole lets hackers in

what next...?

physical access to any bit of kit allows u to follow the manufs repair instructions

if it was remotely exploitable then it might be intresting, but so what if with the install cd u can access the hdd as root, would make installing/reinstalling a bit bloody difficult if it couldnt.

end of the day if they got physical access they dont need to hack just bypass

(possibly one of the few things the ccna course i did got right, was teach the dangers of physical access, any wonder its a part of ccna 1, to recover and reset passwords from cisco routers?)

Google adds PowerPoint viewer to Gmail

why would you want google looking at ur business?

i mean, u will probably find out that they assume ownership/right to archive it as fit, in compensation for the service they offer

never mind the fact that they will probably inject random adverts mid way through a presentation

crap crap and more crap, whats the point in 20gb+ hdd's ohhh yeah so u can store stuff locally and not waste bandwidth. if your too cheap to buy office just download the free viewer apps

just because i could attach electrodes to my balls and plug my self into the mains, doesn't mean that i should or its a good idea, its the same thing with web apps, just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be

put another way, as an industry we should be looking for applications for technology, not trying to push technology looking for applications

Substitute teacher's conviction for porn popups set aside

past sell by date

I don't get why there isn't mandated minimum software levels for publically used computers, especially in schools.

wouldn't be that hard to draw up a list of minimum required software for example

or why there isn't the equivalent of an MOT for publically accessed machines.

If you were to cause an accident in a car you hired through no fault of your own, other than the hired car was defective, but the person hiring was unaware, then it would be the hire companies liability.

Vodafone Live 'improvements' kill mCommerce

serves you right for using net on phone

bout as useful as a chocolate frying pan.

as the only places you tend to get decent 3g reception i find is in towns, the likelyhood of not having a net cafe within 5 mins walk is 0

where u can view the site on a proper monitor, hell a 12" ega crt is a 72" plasma screen in comparision to the crap that is mobile lcd's. access the site infinitely faster, input data easier and not have half your battery dissapear

bah all rubbish, resent the fact phones can do more than store numbers and ring, gladly go back to my old 3210 any day, week or 2 without charge, never crashed just worked, and was actually silent when "silent" without sounding like a dildo/swarm of wasps trying to traverse your desk in a convulsive fit

eBay's phishy old problem

lunatics taking over the asylum?

is it too staggering a concept that ebay furnishes its listers with some generic functions?

e.g. simple image grabber, rss client

i seriously struggle to see what if any dynamic content could be useful on ebay, other than maybe some expand and contract DHTML for a listings details

and even then that could be implimented using something like :

[expandablearea]blah[/expandablearea]

and a piss simple regexp....

anything else is just myspace style fluff and cant be business critical.

end of the day if a user wants it that badly why dont they just use ebays webservices and link to there browser imcompatible listings on there own domain?

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

wouldnt mind seeing a cooke island address as well...

...theregister.co.ck

blaim nathan barley

Crocodile tears for under-fire Microsoft MVP

OSS vs "Free"

As i understand it the launch of express was to enable MS to tempt users away from the various OSS and lowcost php and java IDE's

As a result the software was free to download but came with the usual MS EULA, to protect there investment and IP rights. Just because it is free to obtain and use, doesnt give you free reign to do as you like with it. You have agreed to play by there terms.

quite frankly i find express to be so crippled as to be nearly unusable, and adding additional functionality only highlights this point. and as i suspect express was a idea dreamed up at the last minute, and crippled with a sledge hammer rather than shaved down, by providing a hack to load his extension i expect its paved a way to load a lot of missing functionality into express.

Also i expect MS doesnt want the hassle of having to explain to plebs that just because express is a MS product, the extensions do not necessarily have anything at all to do with them. especially if that functionality is provided through unsupported/unofficial means e.g. a helpdesk grunt might have to deviate from script

Pirate Bay founders host paedophilia site

any different from the brasseye 'special'?

the reaction was the same thing there really

i think paedophilia is one of those topics where a balanced and proportionate view can never be given in public discussion, due to the strong emotions and feelings of disgust it deservedly evokes.

As far as PRQ stand they are damned if they do and damned if they don't, as the sad truth is whether the site exists or not they can and do communicate with each other. though how many of them would be stupid enough to create an account, if the servers arn't physically confiscated, u can bet they will get hacked to shreds, or so heavily policed/flamed as to be unusable...

I think however even if the site remains, it will get the shit sued out of it from people having careers and lives ruined by a maliciously created profile e.g. F in maths, teacher gets a profile

Command Windows with Powershell

script kiddies 2.0

notepad is to old skool for the little fartknocking phone fetishist's

they need a drag and drop gui to make there "l33t" remotely eject ur cd drive script..

Doctor Who faces extermination

why dont they....

just scrap the god awfull side projects, torch wood and that cbbc pile of wonk, sarah jane investigates.. i mean rebadging the famous five, and having plots that insult the depth of geordie racer or through the dragons eye (i am talking about both sideprojects by the way) bound to leave them more time to think of seriously average plots.

that said i would be very welcome to see a change in the writing team, it seems to be becoming an increasingly cliquey writing circle, made of RTD and noteably the bloke from league of gentlemen. and what is up with each episode having a "message", like racial overtones, or neo nazism bad. though this could just be due to them trying to cram too much into too short a time...

Google faces multiple privacy probes

club card tactics

who cares, frankly, everything we do these days is recorded and archived in one form or another, just look at club cards

get over the fact data is kept, instead wonder if the data is valid

currently Tesco's must think im an alcoholic vegetarian with a taste for steak.....

truth is that im a tee total omivore......

the point is data will be retained, especially if it will help them make more money, but as i let anyone who asks use my club card, i can be pretty sure that the data gathered about "me" is not reflective

if it bothers you that much, how about you stay offline?, i mean id be very surprised if el reg didn't gather details about frequency/times of day/story category that comments are posted etc

or you could just write an extension for Firefox which will do 10 fake searches on Google using a random word from a dictionary for every genuine search you perform

cry and bitch about ideals or do something about the reality

to paraphrase my grand father :

"wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which comes true first"

Brown dwarf cools its jets

could be worse, could be daily sport title.....

.....midget star, splurge shocker

.....jade : why i love the midget gush star

.....spunky midget found behind uranus

.....paris and space midget video exclusive

all of those could have been far worse

*too much time on hands, damn the days after bank holidays*

MySpace users snowed in by new blizzard of spam

myspace - or the dangers of letting people use macromedia products and thinking there developers

myspace looks like and i suspect has in large parts been made entirly on a rainy Saturday, by some fartknocker with the ability to drag and drop.

Given a site of its size coldfusion seems like an odd choice for its development, that lack of any real input filtration, remember when it first launched when u were able to inject an IFRAME and totally hide the contents of your page with a page hosted elsewhere or in other words have a perfect phishing shelter

Similarly why any script is able to get through the filters is absurd to me, it really isn't that difficult to filter out the majority of methods used in XSS (disallowing script tags and the string 'eval(' goes a long long way to mitigating the damage), hell even requests for remote resources like all the cunningly concealed tracking packages disguised as 'fun' personality tests should be filtered by there mime type at the very least

but given the general deficiencies in there client interface, im not surprised that the administrative interface can do something simple like delete the post from multiple pages, most likely they delete the post body but fail to delete the update to the thread, so they delete out of one table and leave it in another

have they never heard of cascade delete????, u know that usefull db function which deletes records directly related to the record deleted?

Terminator kill-bots to be run by system called 'Skynet'

All Your Base

Indeed

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Right-to-reply website launches

sod phishing more like trawling

can see it now:

"please sign my online petetion ive set up here <insert link>,

i need you to provide your full address so as to prove each reply is genuine

<right......>,

but dont worry the systems password protected and you can edit your details"

<thank, you you have just given us your default no thought username and password, prepare to be pwned >

never mind the bollox idea that the site is, i mean what will it accomplish other than move the flaming on to more fronts?

given the mentality of most fan boy zealots the existence of a rebuttal would only confirm there cause anyway

i now wonder if that old chestnut of would you kill baby hitler should be updated, to would you kill the person who first filled up a guestbook with meaningless drivel about them selves

EMI and Warner tout camera phone software

...and who will be the first to commit career suicide?

you can almost see the headlines now. celebrity idiot commits career hari kari on you tube after accidentally uploading backstage video....

they said they were 16, i thought it was flour ;-)

Vigilante attack sheep guard British village

and i thought he was talking rubbish

i live 2 miles away, and always thought he was just talking rubbish

must be true if the sun says so ;-)

shall have to watch my back on the drunken stagger back from the oak tonight...... :-P